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Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

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Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#191

Post by h4b4n3r0 »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #183
h4b4n3r0 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embedded has plenty of its own ugliness, though. It just doesn't change at such a rapid clip. In fact, once you ship a thing, it's unlikely to change at all. I appreciate this "do once and forget about it" approach, but at the same time the tooling for embedded can be ugly AF as well.

Depends on your chipset. Last project I worked on was for the Z80 (only a few months ago, strangely). Like buttah.

Z80 was like a brief breath of fresh air in late 80s: hands down the most intuitive assembly syntax I have ever experienced. I bet I could whip up something decent in it even now, in a couple of days. What would one use to compile assembly for it on Linux?

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#192

Post by idontpost »

chubot wrote: post #176
idontpost wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't figured out what the right direction is yet, short of going back to the drawing board with HTML. That's almost certainly what's needed. The fundamental structure of the HTML-CSS-JS triad is the problem that all this complexity tries to abstract around. Separation of concerns is only good if you're separating the right concerns. Back when web pages were really PAGES (ie documents), the Content-Styling-Inte…

There are some sites that are applications, and there are some sites that are documents. I'll go as far as to say that will never change. Applications are only one part of the web; the other parts matter too. I care more about reading documents on the web, and I'm glad it has a nice simple way of presenting them (HTML) and styling them (CSS). CSS works OK as long as you aren't trying to control things pixel-for-pixel…

>There are some sites that are applications, and there are some sites that are documents.

>I'll go as far as to say that will never change. Applications are only one part of the web; the other parts matter too.

That's true, but it's also not the problem domain.

No one is having trouble creating document websites on the internet. That problem is, more or less, solved to the point that almost anyone with no technical background can do it.

Application-type sites are where all the pain points lie.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#193

Post by jholman »

throwawaymath wrote: post #167
freshhawk wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In english, "statistically speaking" can mean you are making a claim about the odds of something rather than a 1:1 correspondence. It is extremely common and absolutely correct. For example I have not run a study but I am very confident that, statistically speaking, tall people are better at basketball than short people. I am saying that I have an opinion that if you were to try and choose good basketball players, bi…

If you believe this is about pedantry and the literal meaning of words, you’ve missed my point. However, you’re speaking to it: the commenter used the phrase “statistically speaking” to indicate their confidence in their assertion. I’m taking issue with the fact that they used the phrase - which, as you say, is strong enough to describe the way taller people are better at basketball - to generalize that Clojure devel…

I think you're mistaken.

I, like you, am riled up by people using puff words to inflate the apparent credibility of claims, often claims that have little or no basis for actual credibility.

But I think that "statistically speaking", as it is used by nearly all English speakers, means "speaking about these groups in aggregate", not "speaking as a statistician". It doesn't even mean something about an empirical basis, it means talking about groups. I agree pretty much entirely with freshhawk's analysis.

Now, aside from _word choice_, your skepticism about whether the original poster has any empirical basis at all for their claim... well, fair enough.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#194

Post by jholman »

jacques_chester wrote: post #79
BurningFrog wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that you're both right. Putting up a simple web site that does something basic, that you then walk away from is easy, and is what a lot of people who call themselves web developers do. Building something like Gmail or Facebook OTOH are endeavors only slightly below the moon landing in complexity and “solving cool problems”. And it is equally legitimately "web development"...

I am not sure I would class either of Gmail or Facebook with the Apollo Program in terms of headcount (est. 400k), total cost (estimates from $100-200 Bn), complexity (hundreds of contractors, millions of moving parts, dozens of directly-operated sites, thousands of projects), or novelty (landing on the fricking moon ).

I think Google's total cost is more than $100-200 billion. It's a bit hard to pin down what "total cost" means in this context, though. But their 2017 operating expenses were $82 billion. Each year is higher than the last, but if you add up the last four years, they're over $250 billion.

Facebook is about an order of magnitude less, so the Apollo program fits nicely between them.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#195

Post by JamesBarney »

smhost wrote: post #125
wellpast wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I have no instincts in this because my experience has always been so fewer women than men on the engineering team. So this is totally anecdotal. But the few women I’ve worked with have always been in the upper part of the talent scale, while there has been much variance among the men. I.e., I’ve encountered many low talent (and high talent) men but not one low talent woman. Maybe there are enough hurdles for wom…

From what we understand about the difference in white-collared intelligence in males vs females, there's a higher variance in intelligence among males than in females. So either women really are in general better at coding than men, or the mid-to-low skilled women aren't making it professionally as much as they should, and only the highest-skilled women are being selected. If your anecdote generalizes, that is. (FWIW…

I imagine being a doctor is more selective for high IQ than development and there are just as many female doctors as male ones.

If this is a true effect I imagine it's a selection effect. Women who felt luke warm about coding never entered, or left.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#196

Post by jstewartmobile »

h4b4n3r0 wrote: post #191
jstewartmobile wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your chipset. Last project I worked on was for the Z80 (only a few months ago, strangely). Like buttah.

Z80 was like a brief breath of fresh air in late 80s: hands down the most intuitive assembly syntax I have ever experienced. I bet I could whip up something decent in it even now, in a couple of days. What would one use to compile assembly for it on Linux?

I used Zilog Developer Studio and C for that particular project, and there was very little inline assembly required.

I don't think I've had to write anything 100% in assembly in 20 years, so no idea what you'd use on Linux.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#197

Post by js2 »

zBard wrote: post #162
js2 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I was trying to say by “value” is that it’s not my job to determine the worth of a particular position to a company. i.e. it’s above my pay grade to decide what a web developer is worth vs a backend engineer, etc. Judging the quality of someone’s work _may_ be my job if I’m asked for peer feedback, but even there I disagree. I feel it should be up to a manager to determine whether his or her reports are doing go…

Shouldn't everyone be judging (and improving) the quality of everyone's work in a team, if you want the project to succeed ? How is a manager to judge the quality of technical output other than peer feedback ?

Sure, code reviews, architectural review, etc. First line managers should be technical enough to know whether their reports are doing a good job.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#199

Post by denkmoon »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #156
denkmoon wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I see an interviewee list out a bunch of things they have "experience" with like that, I assume they actually mean "I used this once".

It's hard to avoid touching the DOM, HTTP, NPM, React, NGINX, Docker, etc. on a daily basis if you're doing any kind of serious work; it's not just some disjoint list of obscure buzzwords.

It's not so much that someone has touched rather the kind of people that think just listing all that out is useful, are typically not the developers I want.
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